March Web Content Management SaaSness

A Match-Up to Determine What Brands Need Most to Deliver Exceptional Digital Experiences

16 features. 1 winner. It’s up to you to determine what’s most critical to managing digital experiences. It’s time to cast your vote on who will take the top spot.

With over 40 million Americans expected to complete an NCAA championship playoff bracket this month, we couldn’t resist getting in on the action by creating our own digital experience management bracket. The premise is simple – to poll marketing and IT professionals with a goal of determining the #1 feature required to create and deploy unparalleled digital experiences.

As the leading SaaS Digital Experience Management company, we spend countless hours debating which features matter most to our customers and how they fit into enhancing our mission to revolutionize digital experiences for all.

About the Teams:

Before we get started, let’s learn about the regions and the teams. We’ve grouped the features most important to IT leaders in the IT region, and the features most favored by marketers into the marketing region. You’ll see some crossover there, but most of them are true to their region.

Now let’s look at the strengths of the teams (or more accurately features) that play a role in building memorable digital experiences and why they made the cut.

Marketing Region Round 1 Match-Ups

1-Personalization

Today’s digital experiences are all about serving relevant content to visitors, which is why personalization is the top seed in the marketing region. But with the looming GDPR and growing concerns about privacy, will the ability to deliver personalized messaging live up to the hype?

VS.

8-Social media

Being able to share content and blog posts to your social media networks directly from your content management platform ensures you’re always pushing out the latest content to your followers. When you consider the enormous role that platforms like Facebook and Twitter play in distributing content, could it edge out the top seed in this battle?

2-SEO

Getting discovered by new customers is the key to growing your business. But if your website doesn’t rank, it’s hindering your opportunity to be discovered. SEO can help you improve your website so that it appears closer to the top positions in the search results, making it a formidable contender in this contest.

VS.

7-AB Testing / Optimization

Whether you have an ecommerce site or a B2B software site, to maximize website conversions, AB testing is crucial to moving the needle. That means giving non-technical marketers the freedom to swiftly create forms and populate pages with slightly different content, and measure their performance. Given the potential positive impact to revenue testing provides, could it turn out to be the sleeper no one expected?

3-Accessibility

If you build a website and 253 million visually impaired people can’t access it, can you call it exceptional? To maximize your audience, revenue, and comply with accessibility laws you need to remove the barriers that prevent disabled people from engaging with your content. That’s certainly a compelling argument, but is it enough to tough it out past the first round?

VS.

6-Legal and brand compliance

For highly regulated industries like financial services, pharmaceutical and insurance, a digital experience must be more than captivating. It also needs to satisfy rigid guidelines and regulations, making legal and brand compliance tools a must. But with such a limited, but fervent fan base, does it have a shot?

4-Multisite Management

Whether it’s multiple brands, regions, or microsites promoting different products, managing all your digital experiences from a central platform not only promotes efficiency and effective oversight, but also provides the ability to reuse content across your digital footprint. For multinational companies with a global presence, multisite management is a must, giving it strong but potentially limited support.

VS.

5-Privacy Consent

In a climate where distrust of advertisers and publishers is growing and legislation like the GDPR is on the horizon, brands that don’t respect the privacy of their users stand to lose significant market share. Some would argue that building trust with your customers is the single most important thing your website needs to do to generate and retain business. With the EU regulation imposing stiff violation fines of up to 20 million euros, it could very well end up being the Cinderella story of this competition.

IT Region Round 1 Match-Ups

1-SaaS Web Content Management (WCM)

For companies looking for a cost-efficient and future-proof solution, SaaS WCM is the obvious choice because there’s no need for equipment procurement, installation, configuration or maintenance. Furthermore, companies are always on the latest version because updates happen automatically at no labor or resource cost. That means IT can focus on more strategic projects, making SaaS WCM a guaranteed safe bet to make its way to the final showdown.

VS.

8-Search

Once a user lands on your site, they need an intuitive and reliable way to find the information they’re looking for, which is where a robust search functionality comes in. Without it, your visitors may bounce and visit the competition because they couldn’t find what they needed on your site. The notion of leaving a prospect or customer hanging because of a poor user experience makes search an undeniable, albeit unexpected threat.

2-Cyber Security

Protecting your website from a security breach or DDoS attack that could take your business offline or expose sensitive data can have an impact on your customers, reputation and revenue. Some might argue that cyber security won’t just win, it will steamroll any opponent that stands in its way.

VS.

7-Tag Management

Your marketing ops team can’t leverage the technology they need to run marketing campaigns without the tags that enable their third-party vendors to deliver. But those enabling tags may be slowing your page load time down and compromising the user experience. Is gaining control over them essential to deploying engaging customer experiences, and if so, are we looking at a possible upset?

4-Rapid deployment

For a growing company entering new markets or looking at a redesign project, standing up a new website quickly is of the essence. But with heavy opposition all around, is speed-to-market the most sought after web content management feature for delivering powerful digital experiences?

VS.

5-Integrations

To maximize operations, marketing, and sales, your web content management system needs to connect with your CRM, marketing automation platform, and your legacy business applications to build a best-of-breed technology stack. As Aristotle once said, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” but is it tenacious enough to beat the opposition?

3-99.99% uptime

When your website’s down, prospects won’t discover you and you can’t process purchases or respond to customer needs, which translates to lost revenue and in some cases a tarnished brand reputation. With a case like that, it’s hard to believe the guarantee of four nines won’t make its way past at least the first round...until you consider the competition.

VS.

6-Flexible architecture

The adaptability of your web content management platform is key to accelerating digital transformation. With a decoupled solution (as opposed to monolithic), content management and content delivery are separate, making it possible for marketers to own the content creation and publishing process while IT develops and releases features independently, making it a surprisingly viable contender.

So, there you have it, it’s time to get your picks in and see who wins the title for the #1 feature needed most by companies looking to deliver exceptional digital experiences to their customers. We’ll be back soon with the results of the first round…